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8 Tips to Help You Own YouTube’s Search Results

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I’ve talked a lot about search engine marketing (both paid and organic) on this blog (check out all of my posts on this topic here , here and here) and yet, as I continue to attend conferences, I don’t hear anything about the giant opportunity search could be for every pharma and healthcare company. This giant opportunity exists because very few of the industry’s websites are actually optimized for search. What this means is that they aren’t owing, or even showing up, for critical keywords. Here’s how Lipitor, the top-selling drug in the world, does for search. If you want all the details on this table, click here. The numbers represent what position Lipitor.com shows up in search results for various keywords. A dash indicates that Lipitor.com is not in the top 500 results for the keyword (note: this was conducted in May).

Lipitor Search Results

Not a pretty picture. Okay, so forget about Google. Maybe there’s a reason why companies aren’t worried about Google. Of course, 80% of all online sessions begin with search and Google has a 63.7% share of all searches. That means that just over 50% of the time when someone starts an online session, they open to Google and search. In other words, if your site isn’t showing up on Google search, it may as well not exist. But, I digress.

Okay, so you’re not focused on doing anything with Google. Maybe it’s too much work, maybe you’re not sure what to do (nor are your agencies). Okay, then, let’s forget about Google and move to number two. What’s the number two search engine in the world?

Here’s how the conversation usually goes when I ask this question:

“Yahoo!, right?”

“What do you mean, ‘No’?”

“Then it’s got to be that new one…Bing…”

“What? That’s really an old one?”

“I have no idea then.”

The answer, of course, is YouTube. YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. In fact, this has been the case since October 2008. Yes, a year ago.

YouTube Logo

So, let’s talk about YouTube instead. If you can’t win with Google (or don’t want to for some reason), then let’s try to win with YouTube.

When you search for “diabetes” on Google, the first three results are the American Diabetes Association website, WebMD’s section on diabetes, and GSK-owned, Diabetes.com. All of these are credible sources with good, quality information. If you went to any of these, you’d find good information that would be a great start to your research. On YouTube, it’s quite another story.

Assignment #1: Go to YouTube and search for “diabetes.” (or just click here) What do you find?

The first three results are a general diabetes overview from AnswersTV.com (whoever they are), the Wilford Brimley Dance Remix, and third is another overview video from unknown source.

This is what we’re dealing with. This is what patients see if they search for “diabetes” on YouTube. One other thing to note, there are 31,600 results for “diabetes” in YouTube. That’s a lot of competition, right? Not really…there are 77 million results for “diabetes” on Google. So, instead of fighting your way to the top of 77 million listings, you only have to beat 31 thousand. Of course, the volume of searches for “diabetes” on Google is going to be much higher than on YouTube, but perhaps if you capture a greater share of clicks because of a higher ranking in search, then maybe you could end up with the same number as if you showed up many pages deep in the Google search results.

Before getting into how to move up in the rankings on YouTube, I’ll deal with one other question I get. How many people are really searching for health related topics on YouTube. Unfortunately, this isn’t a simple number I can provide, as search volume is  a bit harder to find for YouTube compared to Google. It’s probably safe to say that YouTube has far fewer searches for healthcare related information than Google (as a percentage of all searches and total volume of searches). However, it appears that reference-type searches on video sites, including YouTube, might be increasing. From a recent New York Times article: Saranga Chandratillake said that “on Blinkx, some of the fastest-growing searches were in reference categories like money, travel, health and food. More traditional categories, like entertainment, sports and user-generated content, remain more popular but are growing at a slower rate, suggesting a shift.” What’s this all mean? Well, I think it’s safe to say that a YouTube search strategy isn’t going to change the fortunes of your brand dramatically, but it could have an impact.

But if it doesn’t have a huge impact today, it could tomorrow. Alex Iskold, from Adaptive Blue, wrote a great article about how video might just be the future of search in his article “Is YouTube the Next Google?‘ One of the points from his article that struck me: “Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense. But there is a big difference. Television was programmed and inflexible. YouTube is completely micro-chunked and on demand. Kids can search for what they need anytime. This is different, and powerful.” The takeaway for you as a marketer? If YouTube isn’t the way people find information about your brands now, it will be in the future.

So, you’re convinced by now that YouTube optimization is the way to go. How do you do it? It seems the traditional ranking factors for Google don’t necessarily apply to YouTube. Of course, no one knows for sure which factors are most important, as that would make it really easy to cheat, but experts generally agree that the following are most important (in order): “keyword focused anchor text from external links, external link popularity (quantity/quality of external links), diversity of link sources (links from many unique root domains), keyword use anywhere in the title tag, and trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted.” So, what are the top five factors for YouTube?

This is a bit harder to come by mainly because there isn’t an entire industry built around optimizing for YouTube like there is for Google. So, therefore, there isn’t a strong consensus. So, let’s go to the source: Google (owners of YouTube). Here’s what they have to say about optimizing your videos so they show up towards the top of the results for your targeted keywords. Ironically, the video is not on YouTube, so here’s the link to the video and full post with quotes.

The first tip: have good videos. Not surprising. The exact quote: “Online marketers typically are looking to get strong viewership on Youtube, the number one tip I’d give them, first, before optimizing, is to make sure that their content is something that users will engage with. … Make sure that your creative is good, that when users see it, they are prone to respond to it either through rating it writing comments, or even a better scenario, sharing it with other users. Once you have done that, you do want to figure out ways to optimize your videos for organic discovery.” So, for everyone out there who has disabled comments and ratings because you’re worried that people will think your videos stink, your problem isn’t with YouTube’s functionality…it’s your videos. I’ll assume you disabled ratings because you know you won’t do really well. So, don’t read any further until you actually have a good video to share on YouTube (and hopefully more than one).

Okay, the next factors you should work on, according to Google, are (again, from the post referenced above):

  • Make sure your title, descriptions, and tags are clear and concise, describe the video
  • When tagging your video, make sure to use tags that are consistent with one another. “we do have mechanisms in place to detect spamming behaviors”
  • Community is very important for discovery

Well, those first two are really simple. The last one is a bit more challenging. It appears that the community aspects of YouTube also influence the search rankings. “Community aspects?,” you ask. Yes, they factor into the weighting as well.

There’s a lot to consider and here’s the list (from here):

  • title
  • description
  • tags
  • views
  • ratings
  • playlist additions
  • flagging
  • embeds
  • shares
  • comments
  • age of video
  • channel views
  • subscribers
  • inbound links (links from outside of YouTube pointing to your videos).

Well, that’s quite a long list. But there is some good news. It’s not all about views, which is what people always worry about. So, you control a few factors right away by having good titles, descriptions, and tags. Beyond these three and views, there are nine other factors that COULD influence the search results. Again, “could” because no one knows for sure which factors are most important. It’s safe to say that a combination of these factors, with some sort of weighting, is what determines ranking.

This is a lot to consider, so let me break it down a bit. There are basically four groups of factors here: “Within your control,” “Public opinion,” “Sharing,” and “Channel-related.” Here’s what each of these are and the tips on how you can use them:

Within your control

I’ve already mentioned, and so did Google, how the most important factors for ranking are actually within your control. Here are your tips:

1. Create great videos — If your videos are boring and people don’t engage with them, you aren’t going to EVER rank very high. As marketers, we’ve all seen good and bad videos. You know what “good” looks like, so be objective and decide if your videos meet this threshold.

2. Get your listing right — When you submit a new video, you get to write the title, description, and tags for it. Make sure they’re good. If you’re targeting certain keywords, like “diabetes,” then you probably want to ensure that “diabetes” is in the title and description (probably a couple of times), as well as the tags. If you can’t do this part right, then don’t bother with the rest. The age of your video is also a factor, so don’t wait too long to get your videos out there.

Public opinion

Ah, public opinion. It can be fickle. It’s tough. It’s unrelenting. But, it can also be your brand’s biggest advocate. What the public thinks about your video has a lot to do with where it shows up in the search rankings. The tips:

3. It all starts with views — You can get comments or “favorited,” or added to playlists or anything else if no one ever sees your video. So, what do you do? Your video probably isn’t going to be “viral” and seen by millions, as people spread it all over the world. Get used to that. So, that means that you probably have to drive traffic yourself. How? The answer isn’t directing people to YouTube (though you can do that also). The answer is embedding. Up to 44% of people what YouTube videos at least some of the time as embeds and not on YouTube.com. If you watched the Wilford Brimley video above, you watched an embed. That counts as a view even though you didn’t go to YouTube. The point? Don’t just put your videos on your YouTube channel, put them on your websites as well as embeds and drive views that way.

4. Simple engagement counts a lot –This set of factors are mostly out of your control. It includes: ratings, playlist additions, and flagging. Each of these factors all point to whether or not people liked your video. They are all actions that require a bit more engagement versus simply watching the video, but not too much. Here’s what you can do: ask for people to do these things. For some, rating videos is second nature. For others, they don’t think even think about doing it. So, get these people to do it for you. Encourage them to simply click and give you a rating or add it to their favorites. Tell them exactly what to do.

5. You can’t avoid comments — This one’s a bit contentious in pharma and healthcare. Most videos from the industry have comments disabled (many have ratings disabled as well). There are good reasons for this. You don’t want people posting adverse events as comments of course, so disabling comments takes care of this. Rohit Bhargava has another good reason to not allow comments: “[because of] the low quality of YouTube comments (very few are actually substantial or add meaningful observations) as well the fact that you can still post comments anonymously, there is a high risk factor in terms of people saying meaningless things and your team having to waste valuable time to moderate. If you want to create dialogue, bring the video onto your own site and invite comments there instead.” I really can’t argue with that. But people want to leave comments and it seems to count in the rankings. If your goal is to increase your rankings, then getting lots of comments (even crappy ones) will help your rankings. I agree that having a meaningful dialogue about your video probably isn’t going to happen on YouTube, so take Rohit’s advice and embed the video in your site and have the discussion there. But, if you’re going to do that, then does it really matter what the comments are on YouTube since most people will see it as an embed?

6. Links always count — One of the biggest factors for Google search rankings is inbound links. If quality sites are linking to your site, it helps your rankings. Same rules with YouTube videos. Of course, you can embed an entire video, so simply linking to a video is more rare, but it does happen. Question: do you have links to your YouTube videos on any of your websites? No?!? Why not? It’s a simple thing to do that will dramatically impact your rankings. Most pharma and healthcare sites carry a lot of credibility with Google (and therefore YouTube), so you should use their credibility to increase the rankings of your videos as well by linking to them from your brand and corporate sites. A simple fix with a big impact.

Sharing

It’s the biggest indicator of an engaged audience because it takes the most amount of effort.

7. Make sharing simple — Embeds and “shares” are the two factors that  require people to do a little work. For an embed, they have to add it to, say, a blog post (which required work) or write something about your video to explain why they are embedding it. That takes effort, so this might be a very important factor. Therefore, you should encourage people to share your video via embeds. This will increase your ranking in and of itself and also by increasing the number of views. Sharing requires some work because you have to figure out where to share it and some pithy quote to go with it. Make it simple to share the video and ask people to do it. It’s amazing what people will do if asked (don’t forget to say “please”). Simply asking reminds people to share and might actually get them to do it.

Channel-related

No video stands alone. The highest ranked videos seem to come from people who have many other videos or are a part of a YouTube channel.

8. Create an empire – Just uploading one video and hoping people find it isn’t a winning strategy no matter how good the video is. Instead, you should make it part of a channel. Good news for pharma and healthcare: you probably already have a channel (here’s a list from the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki). Subscribers to this channel and views of the channel both seem to count towards your ranking. Again, encourage people to subscribe whenever you can. It doesn’t take much (just a single click), so it’s a low engagement effort you’re asking of your viewers.

That’s it. Quite a lot to consider, but really simple steps. If you have existing videos, go back and see if you’re doing all of this. Touch up your descriptions and tags, embed the videos, ask people to use the ratings, link to your videos from other sites, and share them (you’re on Twitter, right?). And track your progress…try to do all of these things with one video. See where you show up in the search results related to that video now and, say, a month after your fixes. Changing the rankings takes time, so it might be a while for the full effect, but when it comes to YouTube, you should see results pretty quickly. If you like what you see, then take on the rest of your video collection.

If you can’t own Google, at least own YouTube.

If You Charged for Your Content, Would Anyone Pay?

Nike+ Running

As you look through nearly any brand website, you’ll see all sort of content related to the brand. Of course, there’s information about the product including all of the brand messages and, of course, in the case of healthcare, a bunch of fair balance. Most every site in every industry goes beyond this and offers some information about their category whether it be information about LCD versus plasma TVs or, in healthcare, information about the diseases their products treat. That’s all standard.

A few go beyond this, they offer something of a service in the form of an ongoing newsletter to share new content with their customers every so often. It’s a part of many company’s relationship marketing efforts, and these vary dramatically in their value to customers. Some may offer a coupon or special offers only available to members of the program. Of course, the vast majority of these are free to the subscribers. Pharma is no exception, as each of the top selling drugs offer some type of program (whether they’re working as well as they could or not is another story).

And, of course, some companies go even further and offer applications and services at no charge. Some of these are incredibly valuable and others are pretty questionable in their utility. Now it seems like everyone has a free iPhone app for their brand. This includes companies like USA Today, Nationwide, even Chipotle. Healthcare has dabbled in this area as well and have started to offer some iPhone applications. It’s not just iPhone apps either. Other on-site tools offer utility as well from disease trackers to product selectors and even games.

So, everyone is giving more than just brand information on their websites. It makes sense, right? When it comes to healthcare, you need to include information about the disease your product treats, right? You have to include things like diet suggestions, exercise tips, or even relaxation suggestions. Or do you? In many cases, we include this type of information because we think we have to. Our competitors do, so in order for our site to be as “good” as theirs, we do it also.

But think about it for a minute. The non-brand information we provide on our brand sites in healthcare is fairly generic in nature and available from a variety of sources. That is, you can get this type of information from a bunch of different sources; sources that consumers see as more objective than brand sites. Places like WebMD provide countless disease-related articles and tips related to healthcare. Even for specific disease information, third party sites almost always go far deeper than what you’ll find on any brand site. It’s what they do.

Despite this fact, healthcare companies continue to spend a lot of money to create content that can already be found elsewhere. Often, they create applications that don’t offer much value or have limited utility. I’m not picking on healthcare companies. This is common in every industry. We don’t use what’s out there already, we want to create our own version. We don’t link to other resources or syndicate content onto our sites. We want to make our own. But how many exercise tips do we need for people with hypertension?

It’s an ultra-competitive marketplace out there and companies believe they need to “capture” as many people as possible. They want them to stay on their sites and not go elsewhere. So, what better way to do this than try to put everything a person might need on your website? Okay, but here’s the problem with this. If you’re going to make an attempt, people now expect everything they see to be of outstanding quality. You have to remember that they aren’t comparing you to your category competitor anymore, they’re comparing you to everything else they’ve seen online. If your content isn’t of high quality with a lot of in depth information, people will be disappointed. If your application doesn’t work right or is boring, they’re going to be unhappy. Disappointed or unhappy people are not the kind of customers you want.

If you’re going to create your own content, whether it be articles or an application, it had better be good. It’s what people expect. They aren’t happy simply because you made an effort. They don’t need to get it from you, there are plenty other sources. And, that’s where they’ll go if you let them down.

So, the question you have to ask is simple. Is my content seen as valuable to my customers? If it’s not, you need to ask why you’re doing it? Of course, figuring out if your content is useful or not can be tough. It requires complete objectivity and that’s not easy for anyone. I’m going to make it easy for you.

When it comes to the best content and applications, we often pay for them. We pay for them happily because we get so much value from them. So, here’s your question, if you decided to charge for your content or applications, would anyone pay for them? It doesn’t need to be a lot, say, a dollar for your application. Okay, how about fifty-cents? Two bits? Anything? If your answer is no, then your content could possibly be doing more harm than good. People might find your content and get frustrated by its lack of details, limited utility, or because your application didn’t work right.

Here’s the good news, you don’t have to set up a complex payment system on your site. You don’t actually have to charge people for your content or applications. Just use it as a test to see if what you have is good enough.

Much of the content that was once something you paid for is now moving to free. Chris Anderson famously proposed this in his Wired magazine article, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. But many of these free things, we would pay for if they suddenly required us to pay. A few examples: if Google suddenly decided to charge for Gmail, would you pay for it? I would. If Nike decided to charge for Nike+, would you pay for that? I would and I bet that I most people that use it would do the same.

“But,” you say, “we’re not Nike. We’re not Google. We’re talking healthcare. I don’t have to worry about these types of companies. I’m worried about my competitors.” Well, they are your competitors. Everything online is you competitor. Everything is competing for your customers’ time, so they’re you competitors. Here’s the thing to remember, people ARE paying for your content. They pay for it with their time, which is both very valuable and finite. When they waste their time, they waste their money.

Is you content wasting people’s money? If so, what are you going to do to improve it today?

Can Social Media Improve Your Health and Save Your Life?

Regular readers of this blog know that while I talk a lot about social media here, I’m not necessarily sure it’s the cure for pharma marketing. At least, it’s not the cure in the way many marketers think about it. For many, social media represents yet another channel to promote their products. Nearly every pharma and healthcare company sponsored social media effort thus far feels as though it is brand focused instead of patient focused. That is, the primary focus is not to facilitate interaction between consumers and the brand or between consumers, it’s designed to advertise. Yes, there are exceptions, but generally, this is what it is. I won’t go into the reasons for it here, as I’d like to focus on something different: what social media could really mean to our health.

Based on everything in that last paragraph, perhaps it’s not surprising that the biggest innovations in healthcare social media come from companies that aren’t selling anything. One that I discovered a few months ago and have been watching closely is CureTogether. The folks at CureTogether describe their service like this: “CureTogether helps people anonymously track and compare health data, to better understand their bodies, make more informed treatment decisions and contribute data to research.” Sounds good, right? But do they really deliver this? Turns out they do.

I’d encourage you to check out their site and see how it works. Basically, you share a condition you have, it’s severity and how it affects you. You also share what treatments you’ve tried and how effective they’ve been. The site encourages you to share all the medical conditions that affect you. There’s a reason for this (more to come in a bit). It’s a really simple process to add in all this information. They don’t ask for too much or too little. After you input all of your conditions, here’s where it gets interesting.

Earlier this week at the Mayo Clinic Transforming Healthcare Conference,  CureTogether released some of the first data related to their stated objective to “contribute data to research.” They showed that patients who report infertility are 1.9x more likely to report having asthma than patients who don’t report infertility.

Some more detail from their report: “This comes from an analysis of 324 patients. Within the 34 people reporting infertility, 13 (38%) reported having asthma (the remaining 21 out of 34 specifically said they did NOT have asthma). Within the 290 people reporting “no infertility”, 58 (20%) reported having asthma (the remaining 232 specifically reported NOT having asthma). This 38% vs. 20% relative risk is statistically significant, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.2 – 3.1.”

For those who are used to seeing clinical trial data or even those that hear reports of the latest breakthrough study on the evening news, this might sound all a little ho-hum. “So what?” you say. “They did a study that showed a link between  two conditions. There are studies like this all the time.” But that’s where you’re wrong. This study was completely done via the power of social media. It didn’t take years to get the funding or months for IRB approval. It was just done. It’s completely based on what users report on the site and a little bit (okay, a lot) of statistics work. Granted, this isn’t a randomized trial and the data is self-reported, so it might not be considered the be-all-end-all answer, but it certainly generates some interesting hypotheses.

What CureTogether does is really smart. It doesn’t rely on people to come up with theories to prove right or wrong in a trial. We’re not smart enough to think of every possible link or connection between diseases and treatments. Instead, a completely unbiased machine with no preconceived notions about what might work and what might not, pours through the data and finds connections we could never imagine based on the data it’s given.

“Sure, but can we really trust this. How do we know it’s accurate?” Well, the statistics tell us a lot, but there is one other thing. For this analysis, the seemingly unrelated conditions of infertility and asthma have already been investigated and a link has been shown in many other studies using completely different techniques. Again, from CureTogether:

“The importance of this finding is that using only self-reported data, we have confirmed the infertility-asthma association that has previously been explored only in clinical studies:

1. Asthma was found to be associated with irregular menstruation. http://thorax.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/60/6/445

2. Asthma is higher in women with endometriosis (which also has a high correlation to infertility) than in the general population. http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/10/2715

3. The more siblings you have, the less likely you are to have asthma. http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/56/3/209

4. A big cohort study in the UK found no link between fertility and allergy-related diseases but also said that with asthma in particular there was a different relationship to fertility than with eczema and hay fever. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/165/9/1023#FIG1”

Again, another smart twist. Find two conditions where a link has already been established and use it as a test to see how accurate your group really is. It turns out that it’s really accurate. What makes this even more remarkable is that, as of this writing, there are only 4,415 people who have signed up and shared their information. Imagine how powerful this becomes when there are 10 thousand or 10o thousand. The more people involved, the more sensitive the data becomes. Eventually, CureTogether will be able to do much more than find links between diseases. It will be able to identify which drugs are most effective for certain patients, which side effects are most common for specific people, and which combinations of treatments are most effective. It’s basically a crude, but potentially highly accurate, personalized medicine tool.

Isn’t this where pharma wants to go? Well, it’s happening already. How are you playing a role? Are you encouraging everyone who visits your brand sites to go to CureTogether and input their information? Are you calling CureTogether and asking how you can incorporate their survey and tracking tools right onto your site? Why not?

CureTogether is just the beginning. And, while this post seems a bit like an advertisement, I assure it’s not. When I see something special, I’m one loudest advocates you can find. This concept is something special. There are likely other resources like this. Patients Like Me is similar in many ways and allows you to compare your progress to others and see which drugs work best for certain people. In time, this type of analysis will be the standard. With electronic medical records becoming more mainstream along with the slow, but steady adoption of personal health records using platforms like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault, comparisons across a giant scale become possible. Imagine using millions of records each with an incredible amount of detail to do what CureTogehter. The findings would be stunning.

This brings me to my final point. When I shared my thoughts on the future of digital marketing in pharma a while ago, one of the things I said people would eventually do was opt in to share their personal health records in order to be matched with others who are very similar to themselves. A few people commented or contacted me saying that no one would give up their privacy like this. They’re wrong. People will IF they know that they’ll get something valuable in return. CureTogether is anonymous, so there are less privacy issues. However, take a look at Patients Like Me, you’ll find people sharing very intimate details about their health and personal lives including their real names and pictures. They do this because of the value they get from the service. They know that the more they share, the more they get back in the form of valuable comparative data that they can use to guide their medical treatments. When you bring real value, people will do an awful lot to get it.

How many people would be willing to give up their private information to you in exchange for what you offer?

Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring

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That Sham Wow Guy

<Play along and use your best infomercial voice to read this first paragraph.>

Do you find yourself frustrated that you can’t take action when you see something bad said about your product on Facebook? Do you find yourself secretly logging in at home to see what bloggers are saying about you? Do you fret that bad things are being said about your brand on WebMD, but you can’t go and check? Do you have a passing interest in Twitter, but don’t want to spend hours figuring out how it works? Well, then social media monitoring is NOT for you!

<Okay, you can stop the voice now.>

That’s right, for most pharma and healthcare marketers, you should just forget about social media monitoring. I know, I know. Didn’t I tell everyone that one of the principles of pharma and healthcare social media participation was “Monitor and Get Involved.” I did. I’ve had this in  presentations for a while, but now I’m wondering why. Why is it such a big deal to monitor social media?

I’m certainly not the first to suggest that monitoring is a good first step into social media. It’s included as the first step in so many lists, that I can’t include them all here. I know you’ve all heard it before in many different places, so it’s almost a rule. The first step to getting involved in social media is monitoring. Right?

Are you sure?

Of course, there are a lot of benefits to monitoring and the rationale for doing this as a first step appears pretty sound. While you’re trying to figure out how best to leverage a certain social media channel, say, Twitter, why not start just by seeing what others are saying? You can use this information to get a sense for how your brand is perceived in the market and what people are saying. Is it all good? Are they consistent? Are they actually saying anything or do they not care? Is there one thing that you didn’t know? Does it even really pertain to your brand or is incredibly general (e.g., just took my Lipitor)? You might find some informative information and you’ll get a little sense for what people say about you when they aren’t in a focus group saying what they think you want to hear. Great. At the same time, while your monitoring, you can also learn a bit of the etiquette of the channel. Using Twitter as an example, you’ll see how the @ works and what the # is and how to use it (and how not to).

There you go…two reasons to monitor just like that. So, why would I tell you to forget about monitoring? It’s simple really.

Since we’re talking about pharma and healthcare here, I thought I’d use this healthcare analogy. Doctors and other healthcare professionals have a pretty simple rule when it comes to ordering tests: do the test only if the results are capable of telling me to change my treatment decision. That is, if I’m thinking I should do surgery and I have one more test I could do, would the results of the test, no matter what they were, convince me not to do surgery? If the answer to that question is “no,” then why do the test? You already have done tests and some sort of examination that said surgery was the right choice, so why do another test if it’s not going to change your recommendation?

Social media monitoring in pharma is just like this last test. Is monitoring, namely what you find out, going to change what you do? Is it going to change your marketing approach? Is it going to spring you into action? Are you going to actively respond? The answer is probably “no.” So why subject your patient, I mean you, to an unnecessary (and potentially invasive) test?

“But wait,” you say, “we are going to do something different. This will give us some insights into our products and  it’ll give us a great marketing idea.” Really? Here’s how this could go wrong: you could actually do this this. Change your marketing plan based on something you see via your monitoring efforts. Let’s say for a moment that you notice time and time again that people are something as clear cut as, “I know they say that Drug X works really well, but I was shocked how inexpensive it was.” (I know, a stretch, but stay with me.) You notice this a few times in a few places. At what point do you see it enough to change your marketing message? At what point do you focus on the cost a bit more in your communications? 10 tweets? 100? 1,000? Maybe 50 Facebook updates? 15 blog posts? At what point do you know it’s something real and not some sort of anomaly?

You can’t. At least, you can’t by yourself. In order to actually use monitoring to inform you about marketing decisions such as brand messaging, you need something much more robust than you doing a Twitter search and making a few notes. It’s a big commitment. Still think you can do it alone? Great. Here’s what you need to collect:

  • number of brand mentions and the content of each (make sure to include links from the mentions)
  • the tone and sentiment of EVERY mention (positive, negative, or neutral)
  • context of the mention (you’ve got to filter out everything irrelevant like spam mentions)

Okay, that’s a good start. There are a few more, but let’s go with that. There’s still more to do. Do you like Excel? You’d better. Love statistics? You’ll learn to. Because now you’ve got to take all the information you gathered and start to look for patterns, trends over time, and where changes occurred. You then need to correlate this with market events and your brand communications. I’d use about a year’s worth of data to get started. Go ahead…I’ll wait.

If you chose to actually do this by yourself and now are coming back to read the rest of this post, it’s probably October 2010. Most of what you figured out is probably outdated. Sorry about that.

My point with all of this is to say that without a formal plan of what you’ll do with your monitoring efforts, it might just be a waste of time. There are a lot of companies out there that would be happy to help you with this. Some of these tools are free and some are very expensive. This is definitely a category where you get what you pay for. Most expensive isn’t necessarily best, but expect to pay big to do a robust analysis that is going to give you solutions and not just more mountains of data. You do have a budget for this, right?

One other reason why monitoring might not be for you…you’re not allowed. Your company may restrict the sites you can access at work and chances are these include some (if not all) social media sites. Why? I’m not sure, but two possible  reasons. First, they think that you’re going to waste your time all day playing with Facebook. They do this despite the fact that at least one study has shown an INCREASE in productivity when these sites aren’t blocked. Second, they don’t want to know. If you go out and look what other people are saying about your brand and uncover someone talking about an adverse event, you’ve got to report it to the FDA. If it’s not reported directly to you, then you’re not responsible for reporting it. That is, if someone posts an adverse event on WebMD, then you don’t have to regularly go through WebMD and report all of these. But if you see it, then that counts the same as if it were reported directly to you. I’m not implying that pharma companies are trying to sweep this information under the rug, but there’s a reason why more pharma companies aren’t using social media. Dealing with all these reports could be a major pain. For those adverse event mentions that don’t have all the criteria required for submission, you’ve got to try to find the other criteria. When you do have all the criteria, you’ve got to catalog, eliminate duplicates, prepare a submission, send it to the FDA, and prepare to answer their follow up questions (if they have any). There are processes already in place at companies to do this, but they’re not capable of handling this on a giant scale.

If your company doesn’t want you monitoring, then that’s a good indication that you shouldn’t. I’ve heard that a lot of pharma marketers simply log onto these sites at home where they have access to take a look. Of course, as an agent of the company, whether at home or not, they still have to report what they find. How much they’ll actually find is a matter of debate, but you’d should be prepared. Most adverse event mentions won’t have all four criteria (actually only 1 in 500 will), but each company has a different policy about whether they try to find the other two by attempting to contact the person who reported it or if they just gather it all and try to submit it as is. Either way, before you jump in, make sure you’re ready to handle what’s out there.

Just so you don’t feel alone, few companies actually permit social media monitoring according to a poll Len Starnes put together. The poll found that 29% of respondents said there was no internal policy. 7% said monitoring was strictly prohibited no matter what. The rest were shades of “yes” including “yes, but.” See the entire poll here.

The final reason why you shouldn’t monitor is because you might do more harm than good. You start a company Twitter account with the idea that you’re just going to see what people are saying, but you figured you may as well have an account too. Great. Now what happens when someone contacts you? They send you a DM or an @ and want an answer. Do you answer them? Are you allowed? What if you’re on WebMD looking through the forums and see a post that says something like: “If someone doesn’t tell me a way to get this drug for less, I can’t refill my prescription next month.” Now, you know from looking at the rest of the post that this person would be an ideal candidate for your assistance program and would probably get their drug for free. Do you say something? What if you do it anonymously?

If these are hard questions to answer, then you shouldn’t even be looking. When people discover that you’re online and available (and they will), they’re going to come to you looking for answers. If you ignore them, then you’ll do more harm than good, as people will only be annoyed with you.

Okay, so have I talked you out of monitoring yet? No? You’re still going forward. <Gulp> In that case, let’s set a few ground rules. You’ll have to agree to each of these in order to be allowed to monitor social media (on the honor system):

  • I will develop a plan of what to do with what I find BEFORE I monitor.
  • I won’t make any marketing decisions based on my own “analysis.” I’ll find an outside partner who will do this for me.
  • I’ll figure out if my company has a social media participation policy. If so, I’ll follow it, so I don’t get fired and blame this blog. If not, I’ll see if we have any rules about adverse events I may uncover and I’ll help fight to get some formal rules set up.
  • When I do participate, I’ll actually participate. I won’t just be a “lurker” on the sidelines, ignoring everyone that wants to talk with me.

Agree? Okay, good. Now go forth and monitor. Try the two below to get started…and be careful. There’s a lot you’ll find out there that will surprise, bewilder, delight, confuse, frustrate, and annoy you. That’s normal. No need for me to order another test. You’re just monitoring social media.

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